When Is It “Too Early” for Book Promotion?

When someone asks the question, “When is it too early for book promotion?” I answer emphatically, “Never!”

My new book, How to Blog a Book, A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing and Promoting you Manuscript on the Internet One Post at a Time, won’t be out until June 2012 (Yes, the date has changed a bit…), and I’m already promoting. Not only that, I began promoting from the day I first put that blog up and started writing. My first speaking gig was just one month after I began blogging the book.

I have a client who asked me to help her get a proposal ready for a publisher who is interested in her memoir. She has spoken or read from the manuscript two or three times. That’s it. No website. No blog. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts she doesn’t use much. Nothing else. You know what I call that? An empty platform section in her book proposal. And more often than not an empty platform section equates to no publishing deal.

When I asked her about speaking engagements she said, “I can’t do those until I have a book.”

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

I know it sounds like the chicken before the egg, but it’s not.

Plus, get yourself writing and blogging about the topic and you are then the expert on your topic. Then you have good reason to go out and speak. Put the words “author of the forthcoming book” (and then the title of your book) in your email signature and on your business cards and you are on your way to being a published author. Go out and get those speaking and media gigs! Get them now. Don’t wait.

The time for book promotion is when your book is just a glimmer in your mind’s eye.

My book is won’t be in my hands for nine or ten months. I’m supposed to be editing the final version. Yet, today I spent on promotion. I wrote a press release and published it on ExpertClick.com. (Sign up for ExpertClick by clicking here and SAVE $100). I wrote a blog post announcing my book deal and published it and send it out to my social networks. I created a new mailing list at aweber.com just for people who want to be kept updated on the release of the printed version of How to Blog a Book. I placed the subscriber box on my blog site. I put out a new writing-related tip on my Facebook “like” page. I even did a radio interview. (I’m on the air every Monday at 4:34 p.m PT as the publishing expert on Dresser After Dark.)

As I keep saying, if I can do these things, so can you.

Promote, promote, promote. Do it now. It’s never too early to start.